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• W4387331707 abstract "How do living organisms manage the opposing necessities of stability and change? What biological mechanisms can explain both the persistence of traits in populations and the potential for adaptation in the face of external influences? Can that mechanism also explain individual capacities for both self-maintenance and real-time adaptive responses to a changing environment? Biologist and historian Joel B. Hagen's Life Out of Balance: Homeostasis and Adaptation in a Darwinian World describes the work of biologists in the mid-20th century who tried to answer these questions by drawing on the concept of “homeostasis.” Usually understood as the biological maintenance of “stability” or “equilibrium,” Hagen reveals that homeostasis has been a surprisingly nuanced and controversial concept. Life Out of Balance traces the interdisciplinary employment of homeostasis from physiologist Walter Cannon's introduction of the term in the late 1920s and early 1930s, through physiological and medical studies of organismal adaptability to harsh environments in the Second World War, to the debates around selection and causation in evolutionary biology in the 1960s. Over 11 thematic chapters, Hagen evaluates the work of influential researchers, predominantly in the fields of medical physiology and physiological ecology, who bridged laboratory, museum, and field studies of organisms' adaptability to environmental conditions. There are many familiar figures here. Ernst Mayr exerts a particularly large influence on Hagen's story; his 1961 paper “Cause and Effect in Biology”1 and its distinction between functional and evolutionary explanations in biology serve as an anchor for much of Hagen's argument. Other well-known biologists, including Theodosius Dobzhansky, August Krogh, and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, appear in the background as the thinkers who have set the bounds within which Hagen's biologists work. But most of Hagen's focus is on physiologists and physiological ecologists. Hagen's case studies include the canonical studies of the kangaroo rat by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen, Per Scholander and Laurence Irving's critiques of Bergmann's rule, and I. Michael Lerner's concept of genetic homeostasis. These examples reveal how homeostasis became the testing ground for attempts to unify biology in the mid-20th century. The central tension was over how to reconcile scales and to see if the genetic level of modern evolutionary synthesis could be aligned with the organismal and community levels of physiology and ecology. One of the more intriguing elements of Hagen's analysis is his emphasis on how many of these physiologists were critical of the concept of homeostasis even as they drew on it to direct their research. Many of them moved away from explicitly invoking the concept as their work progressed or proposed alternative terms, like René Dubos' “homeokinesis” (p. 227). Hagen does an excellent job of tracing the pervasive influence of homeostasis on these biologists' thinking and research, despite its contested status. He also highlights the personal and professional connections among researchers, fleshing out the network of researchers addressing physiology, developmental biology, ecology, and evolution and thus providing the reader with a sense of the overlaps and variability in approaches to studying homeostasis in this period. Hagen's focus on how the concept of homeostasis has remained both eminently useful and a constant source of controversy provides scientists and historians with a fascinating model for how theories can persist and change within scientific communities. Because Hagen's focus is on methodological variability, his narrative ends up being one of continuity rather than marked change over time, an approach reflected in thematic rather than chronological chapters. Some theoretical and disciplinary changes are discernible, however. For example, Cannon's initial proposal was grounded in medical physiology and the systems thinking of Alfred Lotka, whereas the popularity of cybernetics after the 1940s introduced the idiom of feedbacks. While Hagen writes that “[t]he idea that populations are self-regulating physiological entities was widely popular after World War II” (p. 191), he also shows how the group selection controversies and other debates about cause in biology made this an increasingly untenable position by the end of the 1960s. Analogously, perhaps, to historian of technology David Edgerton's descriptions of continual new uses for old technologies,2 Hagen shows how homeostasis sticks around, morphing through various forms and applications. That Hagen is able to convey this nuanced story of change in such a clear and accessible manner is impressive. He provides a compelling model of how to trace a concept through a network of scientists working across a variety of fields and methods without losing the nonspecialist reader. Most of Hagen's researchers focused their attention on animals. But Hagen also highlights early medical physiology focused on human adaptability, particularly Edward F. Adolph's research on soldiers' needs in desert environments during the Second World War, and the book ends with a consideration of René Dubos' studies of symbiosis and the human microbiome. Hagen also draws out a quiet but consistent tendency among several of these researchers to draw lessons for human social order from their zoological studies of homeostasis—a tendency that contributed to the controversial status of the homeostasis concept. Cannon himself, in his 1931 book The Wisdom of the Body,3 which popularized homeostasis, ended with a consideration of “social homeostasis” (p. 13). Although Hagen emphasizes that this final chapter was included primarily at the urging of Cannon's publisher, Cannon continued to develop its ideas of a balance between “security and freedom” (p. 13) that could lead to a harmonious, self-regulating society in later work. The British physiologist Arthur C. Guyton likewise considered the possibilities of social self-regulation, although he was more pessimistic, suggesting that if anything analogous to homeostasis could evolve in human societies, it might be thousands of years away. Among the most optimistic of Hagen's biologists with regard to social homeostasis was Eugene Odum, who saw the evolution of homeostasis and symbiosis as leading to increasingly stable systems and a preference for mutualism over the “negative interactions” (p. 235) of parasitism and competition. While none of these biologists proposed that social homeostasis operated in precisely the same manner as organismal homeostasis, the mechanism of social homeostasis and how much it was meant as a biological truth or a social metaphor remain fuzzy in their accounts. Although I would not want to detract from Hagen's tight focus on the dance between concepts of homeostasis and adaptation, these tantalizing examples of biologists' inferences about human social implications do make me wish Hagen had given this side of the story a little more play. Hagen provides the most insight on such issues in his discussion of Cannon's Wisdom of the Body. But it would have been nice to see similar moments throughout the text. I would also have liked to see Hagen's second term, “adaptation,” receive more detailed attention. Although Hagen sets up homeostasis and adaptation as his primary interlocked terms, we receive far more clarity on the meaning of the former term for his actors than the latter. Adaptation is naturally implied each time Hagen mentions evolution. But the specific differences among these researchers in understanding adaptation and how that also contributed to their differing views of homeostasis and its evolvability could be expanded. In tracing the complex tensions between ideas of homeostasis and adaptation, Hagen expands the history of mid-20th century biology beyond the modern synthesis by investigating important experimental and theoretical work that is often overlooked in histories that focus on laboratory genetics. Life Out of Balance is a model for showing how the ideas of modern synthesis were embedded in and threaded through biological practice in sometimes diffuse ways—rather than dominating biological practice and theorizing whenever it was invoked, as summaries of this historical period sometimes suggest. In contrast to stories of the history of biology as a gradual move out of the field and into the laboratory, Hagen shows how many researchers turned from laboratory to field studies, as well as drawing on museum collections, in their attempts to understand the relationship between the individual need to maintain homeostasis and the population-level need for adaptability should selective pressures change. There is much here for the practicing biologist, especially for those in ecological developmental biology and related fields that continue to investigate the relationships between individual organismal persistence and evolutionary change. Although Hagen does not highlight the distinctiveness of his interpretation, his consistent focus on the entanglement of physiology, ecology, and evolution through the concept of homeostasis provides a unique perspective on postwar biology. It provides a much-needed expansion of the available models for histories that include the influence of cybernetics and the modern synthesis without letting those two attention-hogging concepts take their preferred place center stage. Hagen has provided biologists and historians alike with a careful and thought-provoking analysis of the complex relationship between homeostasis and adaptation, both for organisms and for researchers interested in these concepts." @default.
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• W4387331707 title "Life out of balance: Homeostasis and adaptation in a Darwinian worldBy Joel B.Hagen, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. 2021. pp. 336. $59.95 (Hardcover). ISBN: 978‐08173‐2089‐8" @default.
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